I Hate That I Still Want Her

Chapter3

Chapter 3: The Sister Who Kept the Secret

Ethan had known Sophie Cross since she was fourteen years old, all elbows and opinions, the kind of little sister who used to burst into his and Amelia's dinners uninvited just to steal fries off his plate and interrogate him about his intentions with a bluntness that used to make Amelia laugh so hard she cried. He had loved her, in the easy, uncomplicated way a person loves the family they marry into before the marriage happens, and losing her along with Amelia had been its own quiet, unremarked grief he had never once given himself permission to name. Hearing her voice again now, after five years of silence, felt like being handed back something he had assumed was gone for good, right before it was used to break him a second time.

The words did not land right away. They seemed to hover somewhere just outside Ethan's understanding, close enough to hear, too enormous to fully absorb, the way sound sometimes reaches a person half a second before the shockwave that follows it.

What did you just say, he asked, very quietly, very carefully, as though speaking too loudly might shatter whatever fragile thing Sophie was finally allowing herself to say.

You heard me, Sophie said, and now that the first sentence had escaped her, the rest came faster, tumbling over itself like water breaking through a dam that had held for five long years. Three weeks before the engagement party, Amelia collapsed at a gallery opening. They ran tests. It was lymphoma, Ethan. An aggressive kind. The doctor gave her numbers that made all of us sick, gave her a treatment plan that would take months, maybe longer, with no promises at the end of it.

Ethan sat frozen on the edge of his couch, the scotch forgotten on the counter, the city lights outside blurring into meaningless smears of orange and white. That's not, he started, and stopped, because there was no sentence that could follow that wasn't insane. That's not possible. I would have known. She would have told me.

That's exactly what I told her, Sophie said, voice cracking. I begged her to tell you. I told her you deserved to know, that you would want to be there no matter what happened. And do you know what she said to me?

Ethan couldn't speak. His throat had closed around something enormous and jagged.

She said she had watched our mother waste away for two years taking care of our father while he died of the same thing, watched her lose her job, her friends, her own health, watched her become a ghost standing over a bed instead of a person living a life. And Amelia said she would rather you hated her for the rest of your life than watch you become that ghost for a woman who might not even survive to thank you for it.

Ethan pressed the heel of his hand hard against his eye, some useless animal instinct trying to physically hold himself together. So she, he said, his voice unrecognizable even to himself. The kiss. Marcus. All of it.

Staged, Sophie said flatly. Every second of it. She called Marcus herself, asked him to meet her on that terrace, told him exactly what to do and when to do it. She rehearsed what she would say to you in the coat room in front of a mirror for two hours before the party, Ethan. She threw up twice beforehand. I held her hair back myself. Then she walked out there and destroyed you on purpose because she loved you enough to let you go instead of loving you enough to watch you break slowly for years.

The room seemed to tilt. Ethan stood up, paced two steps toward the window, stopped, turned back, unable to settle his body into any position that felt survivable. Five years, he said. Five years I hated her. Five years I told myself she was cruel, that she never loved me at all, that I was a fool for ever believing in her.

I know, Sophie said softly. I watched it happen from the outside and I couldn't say anything. She made me promise, Ethan. She made our mother promise. She said if you ever found out while she was still sick, you would throw your whole life away trying to save her, and if she died anyway, she couldn't bear the thought of you having wasted years on a woman who was never going to make it out the other side.

And now, Ethan said, forcing the words out through a throat that felt lined with glass. Is she. Sophie, is she.

There was a pause, the kind that made his heart stop entirely before it resumed at double speed.

She's in remission, Sophie said finally, and Ethan nearly folded in on himself with relief before her next sentence arrived and stole it back. Has been for almost two years. But it's not simple, Ethan. This type of cancer, it comes back sometimes, aggressively, without much warning. She gets scanned every few months. She lives with that hanging over her all the time, and she has never let herself believe she gets to want a future the way normal people do, because she's terrified of building something only to lose it and make someone else watch her die the way she watched our father die.

Why are you telling me this now, Ethan asked. Five years of silence, Sophie, five years, and now, tonight, out of nowhere.

Because I saw her tonight, Sophie said, and her voice finally broke completely, all pretense of composure gone. She came home shaking, Ethan. She locked herself in her room and I heard her crying through the door for an hour before she finally let me in, and when I asked her what happened she told me you said you still wanted her. She told me you meant it. And Ethan, I have watched my sister survive cancer without crying once in front of me, not once, but tonight she cried like the world was ending, because some stubborn, i***t part of her still loves you exactly as much as she did five years ago, and she has spent five years convincing herself she doesn't deserve to want that.

Ethan sank back down onto the couch, his legs no longer entirely reliable, staring blankly at the dark harbor outside his window, five years of grief and fury and carefully cultivated hatred rearranging themselves violently into something almost unrecognizable, something that felt disturbingly close to hope, except hope had never once been safe for him where Amelia Cross was concerned, and some old, scarred instinct warned him that it might not be safe now either.

Sophie, he said slowly, does Marcus know. About the diagnosis, I mean. Did he know back then, when she called him to help stage it.

Ethan sat with that for a moment, turning it over the way he might turn over a contract clause that did not sit right, searching for the trick buried in the fine print. Marcus had been there that night too, he remembered now, standing near the terrace doors before Amelia ever called him outside, watching the party with the patient, satisfied expression of a man who already knew how the evening would end. At the time Ethan had read it as simple social ease, the natural comfort of a man born into rooms like that one. He was no longer certain that was all it had been.

That's the part I don't understand, Sophie admitted, her voice dropping to something uneasy, almost frightened. Amelia swears she only told him the bare minimum, enough to get him to play along for one night. But Ethan, a few months ago I found an old email in her archived folder, from before the diagnosis, months before, where Marcus was already asking her father about buying into Cross Designs. He was already circling before any of this happened. And now he's the one who put you two back in the same building together, on the exact same week as the anniversary. I don't think that's a coincidence, and it's been eating at me for weeks, but I didn't know how to bring it up without unraveling everything else.

A cold, entirely different kind of dread began crawling up the back of Ethan's neck, one that had nothing to do with grief and everything to do with the sick, sliding feeling of a much larger picture only beginning to reveal its edges.

Sophie, he said carefully. I need you to send me that email.

There was a long silence on the line, and when Sophie finally spoke again, her voice had gone very quiet, very tight.

Ethan, she said. There's something else. Something I only found out myself two days ago, and I haven't told Amelia yet because I don't know how to tell her without destroying what's left of her trust in anyone.

What is it.

The venture Marcus put together, the one you signed tonight. I went through the shareholder structure this afternoon because something about the terms felt wrong to me, and Ethan, Marcus isn't just an investor in both your companies.

What is he, Ethan demanded, standing again, every muscle in his body suddenly, violently alert.

He's the majority stakeholder, Sophie whispered, in a shell company that holds enough combined shares in Reyes Holdings and Cross Designs to force a full merger under both your bylaws, and if that merger goes through under the terms buried on page forty of that contract you just signed, Ethan, Marcus Vale doesn't just win everything either of you built.

He owns it outright, Ethan finished, the floor seeming to drop out from beneath him entirely, and Sophie's silence on the other end of the line was answer enough.

For a long moment neither of them said anything at all. Ethan stood in the middle of his enormous, silent penthouse, phone pressed hard against his ear, replaying the last two hours of his life as though they belonged to someone else, a man who had walked into a glass tower believing he understood every variable of the deal he was signing, and had walked out having handed the architect of his own five year long heartbreak a signature that might now cost him everything he had spent that heartbreak building.

Ethan, Sophie said finally, her voice small and frightened in a way he had never once heard from her, not even as a teenager, not even at their father's funeral. I don't know what he's planning, but I know it's bigger than a business deal. He's been patient for five years. Men like that don't stay patient for five years over money.

No, Ethan agreed grimly, looking out at the dark water where, three miles distant, the lit windows of Vale Tower still burned against the night sky like something watching him back. They don't.

Then what do we do, Sophie asked.

Ethan closed his eyes, and for the first time in five years, allowed himself to think of Amelia not as a wound to be managed but as someone standing, unknowingly, in the path of a threat only he and her sister could now see clearly enough to name.

First, he said, we make sure Amelia is safe. Then we find out exactly how long Marcus Vale has been planning to destroy both our families, and we make sure he never gets the chance to finish it.

Sophie exhaled shakily on the other end of the line, something in her breathing loosening slightly for the first time since she had called, as though five years of carrying this alone had finally found a second set of shoulders willing to help bear the weight of it. There's one more thing, she said quietly, and Ethan, hearing the fresh hesitation in her voice, felt his stomach drop all over again before she had even finished the sentence. Amelia has a scan scheduled for Thursday morning. Routine, she keeps telling me, just routine monitoring like always. But she's been more tired than usual these past few weeks, Ethan, and she thinks I haven't noticed, and I am so afraid that Thursd

ay is not going to be routine at all.